When I wrote to Heinlein, I'd said to him that his reaction to my book
would partly determine what it was to be. I think now that this was even
more true than I appreciated at the time.

Imagine that when he'd read my letter, Heinlein had been capable of dealing
with it with tolerance, patience and tact. In that case, he might have
written to me to say that it was flattering to hear that Advent and I intended
to do a book about his stories and he felt honored, that he'd read my article
in Shangri-L'Affaires and gotten a good laugh from it and hoped
I would do better in my book, and that while I'd overloaded him with questions,
some of them more complex than I appreciated, he would do his best to answer
them as time and work permitted.

A reply like that would have disarmed me completely. The resulting book
would surely have been more accurate and complete for Heinlein's cooperation.
And where I was dense, ignorant or inadequate, he'd have had every opportunity
to set me straight. Heinlein, Advent and I might then have shaken hands
all around at the result.

Or imagine if you will that Heinlein had been as genuinely indifferent
to me as he would generally present himself as being. Then, if an Alexei
Panshin wrote something critical or even judgmental about his stories in
a mimeographed fan magazine like Shaggy,
so what? It was only the
opinion of that kid who'd plagued him about nuclear testing, thrown off
in a fanzine. And if Advent asked Panshin to do a book about Heinlein's
stories, and Panshin then wrote to say that he intended to be real earnest
about it, well, that was just fans playing their own little fan games.
Heinlein could go on about his life as though none of this existed.

We will never know what the book I was writing would have proven to be
if Heinlein had been as completely uninvolved as this. It is possible that
it could have been the simple book I was sending to Advent in chunks as
I finished them. Or perhaps it might have mutated. If Admiral Laning had
shared Heinlein's proto-Future History manuscript with me -- as his mentioning
it at all suggested he might -- then the book I wrote could have been very
different than it was.

Instead of cooperation or non-involvement, however, Heinlein did perhaps
the least productive thing he might have done. He elected to treat me as
an adversary to be contained and neutralized.

In fact, as I look back on the situation now, it appears to me that by
the end of January 1965, Robert Heinlein must have thought he was under
siege and had already taken rounds of incoming fire.

First and worst was "HEINLEIN: BY HIS JOCKSTRAP." This essay suggesting
that his hard-won sexual sophistication was basically conventional and
adolescent was clearly absurd, and yet it was maddeningly difficult to
refute. Heinlein felt that he had been personally attacked (as I have no
doubt that he had been by the editor of Shangri-L'Affaires) and
he wasn't willing to accept my word that I hadn't been a knowing participant
in snapping his elastic, but had only been co-opted into the game. I'd
written what I'd written, and Heinlein found it impossible to forgive or
to forget.

And then, after a silence, here came a series of further shots.

There was my letter of December 15, belatedly opened. From Heinlein's point
of view, all that stuff I said about being responsible could be discounted.
What really mattered was the promise of negative comment and low blows.
That
he
could believe. And I also promised to poke my nose into matters where it
didn't belong -- as a number of the apparently innocuous questions I asked
in my letter indicated to him.

Further, there was my suggestion that Earl Kemp -- for whom he'd done the
favor of delivering a talk which had then been reprinted as part of an
Advent book, and then thefavor of flying to the Worldcon in Chicago
to accept the Hugo for Stranger in a Strange Land in person -- had
unaccountably turned on him by soliciting the writing of my hostile, intrusive
book.

And then, when he checked with people like Lurton Blassingame and Caleb
Laning, it was to find out that I had already contacted them and was asking
them questions, too.

Heinlein's reaction to these tests of his willingness to defend himself
was one that came naturally to a Navy man. He battened down the hatches
and set out to secure everything that was loose.

But then word came to him of another and even more damnable provocation.
By some trick, I'd managed to get my hands on the personal letters he'd
written to "Sarge" Smith. And that was intolerable.

Hardly had the dirt settled on the poor man's coffin when here I was to
sweet talk Smith's widow out of Heinlein's private letters. Had I no sense
of honor at all? What might I have discovered in reading them?

So Heinlein made a reconnaissance. He got on the phone and called the man
behind the scenes -- Earl Kemp. And he asked him flat out whether
or not it was true that Advent had commissioned Alexei Panshin to write
a book about him.

It seems very possible to me that under that kind of confrontation, Earl
Kemp may have done a little tapdancing. At least, I can imagine him saying
something like:

"Well, it's true that Panshin is writing a book on your stories. But whether
Advent publishes it or not depends upon its accuracy and fairness. So far,
we've seen a number of his chapters, and they seem pretty sound to us."

Heinlein informed Kemp that I was someone with whom he'd had trouble in
the past, and that not only was I poking my nose into his affairs now,
I'd connedhis best friend's widow out of the letters Heinlein had
written to him.

Again, I can imagine Kemp saying something that was true from his point
of view but totally inadequate from Heinlein's, like: "Panshin can certainly
be tactless, but I know him and he's well-meaning. Would you like to see
what he's written so far?"

However, whatever Kemp actually did say Heinlein interpreted as conflicting
with what I'd written to him. In the letter he asked to have passed on
to me in 1973, Heinlein would state:

"I was never able to determine the facts about this alleged assignment
to write a book. Only one thing is clear: Either Earl Kemp lied to me about
Mr. Panshin or Mr. Panshin lied to me about Earl Kemp. But I changed my
mind with cause about Kemp's reliability; I now judge tentatively that
Kemp lied and Mr. Panshin told the truth or close enough to the truth."

Did Earl Kemp actually lie to Heinlein? It seems far more probable to me
that the two of them were simply on completely different pages and were
talking past each other.

When Heinlein called Kemp, what he wanted to know was whether it was true
that Advent had asked me to write a book. If Kemp had said flat out that
Advent had commissioned me to write a book about him -- and that they'd
done it because they liked my Shaggy article -- that would have
been proof positive to Heinlein of Advent's malice toward him.

But Kemp never did admit that Advent had sought me out. Instead, he'd equivocated,
which was quite as bad as lying. In fact, it was worse because it wasn't
forthright.

I tend to think that Heinlein was ready to believe me from the outset on
this point, if on nothing else. And it really didn't matter much to him
whether Kemp acknowledged his ill will openly or whether he attempted to
conceal it. The fact that there was to be a book on Heinlein written by
me was all the evidence that Heinlein needed of Advent's real intentions.

For their part, Advent thought that what was central was not whether there
was to be a book on Heinlein's stories, or whether I was the person who
wrote it, but whether or not the book was sound. So they wrote a letter
to Heinlein and not only offered him the opportunity to see what I'd written,
but said that they would have me change any point that Heinlein identified
as beyond the bounds of legitimate criticism.